Schiller’s Liquor Bar closed out its last night Sunday with cheers, confetti and cocktails galore. The bistro, which in May announced that it would shutter due to a rent hike, remained crowded well past its normal midnight closing hour and food was also served late. Longtime patron Michael Reynolds, who also co-owns neighboring Black Crescent, held court at the center of the bar where he stood on the stretchers of his stool, cheered, and liberally passed drinks to friends.

Yesterday the City Council passed a sweeping package of pro-tenant legislation long advocated by tenants’ rights groups, activists, and sympathetic city officials. One of the key organizations that lobbied for the legislation, the “Stand for Tenant Safety” coalition, held a support rally outside City Hall.

The main target of the new legislation is the widespread practice of “construction as harassment,” whereby landlords use invasive, unsafe, and sometimes illegal construction to drive out tenants. Typically the landlords are trying to get rent-regulated tenants out so they can charge market rents.

Those in attendance at the most recent “Kink ‘n’ Draw” event got to feast their “lustful and perverted eyes” on latex-clad live models as they posed in erotic tableaux carefully designed by one of our favorite New York characters, fetishwear entrepreneur and kink advocate the Baroness.

“Worlds Fairs have inspired Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, and many others to express their brilliance. For 130 years, American cities set the standard for Worlds Fairs. Now it’s time to rebuild the world’s greatest stage in the United States, and inspire the pursuit of our best possible future.”

So says the manifesto of Worlds Fair USA, an organization which describes itself as “an independent effort to bring the international showcase of the future, featuring the world’s most amazing technology, art, and more, back to the United States.” Keep Reading »

A new craft beer store is coming to the Lower East Side: Beer Fridge, at 41 Essex St., is currently in soft launch, with the official opening “hopefully sometime in the next few weeks,” according to owner Cat DiPaci.

“We’re working out the kinks,” she added. DiPaci, 26, is a first-time entrepreneur. In terms of industry qualifications, “I’m a very avid beer drinker,” she said.

Ever felt the urge to wine and dine on the deck of a 93-year-old ship with good ol’ Lower Manhattan rising behind your glass every time you toast to the beauty of the setting sun? Well, check out Pilot, a new schooner-bar that opened today at Pier 6 in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Brooklyn Label, the French corner restaurant in Greenpoint’s historic Astral Building that closed last year, is going to be revived. Now under new management, it will return from the dead with a little help from Le Gamin, another beloved French bistro located in Greenpoint.

Does government surveillance really get your goat? (To be honest I have never really understood that expression but I am just going to run with it.) Is your ideal evening spent watching documentaries on the deep state? If so, then you’re in luck.

In a new film fest running today through Aug. 5 — ominously titled “Spy vs. Us” — the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) in the East Village takes on national security and the surveillance state. Even better, like last year’s MoRUS-sponsored film and theater festivals, this year’s festival screenings will occur in the lovely environs of several community gardens. Tonight’s opening screening takes place in the roof garden of Alphabet City’s fabled Umbrella House.

We reported last week that beloved Cajun eatery and longtime Bowery hangout Great Jones Cafe was temporarily shutting down — and, according to cryptic information from an employee, would or would not return. Fearing that the Great Jones had become yet the latest victim of rising rents, New Yorkers swarmed onto social media to pay their respects and lament the loss of a neighborhood institution that has served as an indispensable cultural hub for local artists, musicians, and writers — some of whom, like Basquiat, have become quite famous.

In his first book, Making Rent in Bed-Stuy (HarperCollins, 2017), New York-based writer and filmmaker Brandon Harris uses his memoir of “trying to make it in New York City” as the starting point for a complex, multi-layered discussion of race, class, and gentrification.

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About B + B

Bedford + Bowery is where downtown Manhattan and north Brooklyn intersect. Produced by NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in collaboration with New York magazine, B + B covers the East Village, Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and beyond. Want to contribute? Send a tip? E-mail the editor.